When Hearthstone Battlegrounds’ Duos mode was announced in November last year, Blizzard said to expect the launch in early 2024. We now know that April 16 is the day players will begin buddying up to take on lobbies. The full blog post is here. 

I’m a long-time enjoyer of the auto-battler spinoff, so I’m looking forward to jumping in over Discord with my colleague Austin on GamesRadar, whose head for strategy, APM, and MMR are all substantially higher than mine.

In Duos you share a life pool with your teammate and face off against three other teams. You initiate a game by inviting anyone from your friends list to partner up, or you can opt to take your chances with solo queue, although I can only imagine the kind of frustration trying to strategise with a rando using in…

Warbands are a new and long-awaited addition to World of Warcraft, giving you far more flexibility when it comes to which character you want to play. This system lets you share certain aspects of the characters on your account such as reputation, achievements, and more.

The War Within is set to release next month on August 26th, but Warbands arrive with the pre-patch and should be live from July 23rd. As the system will be migrating a lot of character data as players log in, just be aware that there might be some delay in the processing of your Warband initially. With all that in mind, here’s how Warbands work.

WoW Warbands: How they work

Many WoW players, myself included, have more than one character they like to play but it can become tire…

In the wake of yet another blowup amongst the Helldivers 2 community over an unpopular balance patch, game director Mikael Eriksson says Arrowhead “didn’t hit our target with the latest update,” and laid out the studio’s plan to do a better job with future patches.

The problem is the Escalation of Freedom update released earlier this month, which among many other things nerfed a fan-favorite flamethrower, making it far less effective than it was against Chargers. Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani quickly waded into the fray, doing his best to mollify the masses with a brave face; “We need to do better” with future updates, he said after a few days, adding that “just talking about it isn’t enough. Actions matter.”

Now we’ve got an idea as to what sort of actions the studio plans to…

theres_no_way_im_allowed_to_have_this_much_fun from r/KerbalSpaceProgram

Good day. A popular Kerbal Space Program video-maker has recreated a famous scene from the movie Twister, down to lip-synching the actors’ chatter with that of the Kerbals driving. They’ve also recreated the diverse and quirky array of weirdo vehicles the film’s storm-chasing scientists drive, and watching the kerbals bounce them over the terrain is a delight. This is no joke one of the best establishing scenes in the movie, as the adrenaline-high chasers chatter while Van Halen’s Humans Being blares in the backround:

“Shine on, shine on.”

Creator Ravenshaddow titled their post “There’s No Way I’m Allowed To Have This Much Fun.” To which I say, friend, you are…

Ashes of War and Weapon Arts in FromSoftware’s newer games have really spoiled us⁠—it used to be you got your R1, R2, and some movement-dependent attacks, and that was it. Now when I go into a Soulsborne, I want some spice. I want the Rakuyo double-bladed katana’s mixups, the Farron Greatsword’s straight-up Samurai Champloo breakdancing, or the Marais Executioner Sword’s Jedi telekinesis nonsense.

I’ve been a little worried that FromSoft just won’t be able to top the excellent and varied armory already in Elden Ring, but modder clevereraptor6 over on NexusMods has been quietly toiling away on custom weapon movesets that prove just how much juice is left in the animations and effects FromSoft has already created.

Take my favorite work of Clever’s: the Ice…

Free-to-play survival game Once Human launched on Steam today, and after playing the NetEase production for an hour, my main observation is that the feeling of uncertainty and discovery that the survival genre used to be all about has lately been replaced with tutorial screens and boring exposition—the price of popularity, I guess! It’s possible that Once Human opens up after you get past the copper ingot crafting lessons, and I’ve seen some cool monster designs so far, so that’s a positive. Some of them were even of my own making.

Character creators are such a wild card: Story-driven RPGs that are all about the characters sometimes give you a few dull presets and unattractive hairstyles, but then a game like Once Human comes along and lets you customize “mid lower-lip thick…

“When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants,” said the greatest philosopher who ever lived: Mass Effect 2’s Thane Krios, “then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.”

And friends, I’m excited to announce that war has officially provideth-ed for every man, goat, chicken and guard in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. Mostly by death. As reported by GamesRadar, a player named Amelix34 has accrued a lifetime bounty of 267,000 gold after killing “everything that was killable” in the game’s world. That is, says Amelix34’s own stats page, 3310 people, 693 animals, 401 “creatures,” 947 undead, 55 Daedra, and 98 automatons. No backstabs, though, so at least it was honourable. 

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